BOSTON - Gov. Mitt Romney is leading an effort to restore $16 million to an account that pays public defenders to represent indigent criminal defendants - an account that is set to run dry before the end of the fiscal year, leaving hundreds of private lawyers without their full pay.

The move by the governor would not be especially unusual except that he vetoed the money in the original state budget, causing the cash shortfall and prompting a temporary boycott of new cases in November by Essex County public defenders and chaos in district courts statewide.

"This is going to relieve a lot of anxiety," said David Hallinan, executive director of the 230-member Essex County bar advocate program based in Salem, when told of the governor's about-face. "It's extremely important that we get the money back, this means they will get paid."

Hallinan said money to pay the public defenders will run out in March or April, two to three months before the June 30 end of the fiscal year. The lawyers, however, are required by law to continue their open cases regardless of whether there is money to pay them. Several local bar advocates have quit the program since the governor vetoed the money, Hallinan said.

"There are more crimes and more arrests every year and judges are appointing bar advocates to more and more cases," he said. "That means we need more money and more public defenders. Yet they are cutting money and driving many lawyers out of it."

Romney spokeswoman Nicole St. Peter said the governor had always intended to pay the public defenders. She said the plan all along was to do it closer to the end of the year with a supplemental budget appropriation.

"Historically that account has been underfunded like the snow and ice budget because there is no way to know ahead of time exactly how money will be needed," St. Peter said.

Hallinan disagreed with the governor's claim.

"This year was totally different because it was the first time there was a veto," he said. "Our money was never vetoed before."

Deborah Sirotkin Butler, a lawyer for the Massachusetts Association of Court Appointed Attorneys, a newly formed group of about 300 public defenders formed to advocate for higher pay and better working conditions, said the governor's veto politicized the issue.

"It set up a situation where we had to continue to advocate for what we are due," she said. "For months we have had to worry about whether we will get paid."

The Senate was expected to approve the $16 million Wednesday, but it was delayed when Senate Republicans, who proposed the spending bill at the request of Romney, were unable to hammer out an agreement with Senate Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Frederick E. Berry, D-Peabody, said he expects to quickly resolve the issue and pass the spending bill.

"The governor's veto was ill advised and we will take care of it," he said. Sirotkin Butler said top lawmakers in both the House and Senate have told her they will approve the money. But she also said the bar advocates are pushing to have their hourly pay increased, another contentious issue between the lawyers and the governor.

"Certainly making sure we get paid is the first priority," Sirotkin Butler said on behalf of the state's 2,742 bar advocates. "But there is still tremendous dissatisfaction with the $30 per hour pay rate."

She said the pay rate for bar advocates in Massachusetts is the third lowest in the country, and that it has not been increased in 20 years. She said the program lost about 10 percent of its lawyers over the last year to low pay and the ongoing feud with Romney and the Legislature.

The lawyers, who can earn about $55,000 annually as private pubic defenders, say it not enough to live on after paying expenses for rent, utilities and heat for their offices. The Legislature is expected to consider this session a bill that would increase the bar advocates pay to as much as $60 an hour. When the Essex County bar advocates began refusing new cases in November, Romney's chief legal counsel, Daniel B. Winslow, warned the lawyers that the governor would ask the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which manages the state's public defender system, to bar for life from the system those who refused to represent poor people.

The lawyers began the boycott after the Legislature failed to overturn the governor's veto of the money. The job action caused scores of arraignments and bail hearings to be postponed in the district courts. And while Romney's threat further angered the bar advocates, they quickly began taking new cases again.